


What have you looked at, Moon?

by middlemarch



Category: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Genre: F/M, I think we can all appreciate Michael Sheen's Boldwood, Marriage, Moonlight, Post-Canon, Romance, references to Frank Troy, references to William Boldwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 21:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20180665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: When they married, Bathsheba had thought she understood everything about Gabriel. She thought she had known his every expression.





	What have you looked at, Moon?

They slept with one curtain drawn back, so the sunlight would wake Gabriel at dawn. Bathsheba discovered, however, that the moonlight woke him as well; he was most restless when the moon was full. He was another man then, he spoke then of what he would not say during the day, nor when the candles were lit or the flames guttered in the hearth. He was not tender with her the way he was when he kissed her goodnight, beginning with her two hands, raised to his lips in a ritual of his own making. Gabriel-in-the-moonlight woke her with a deliberate finger tracing her cheek, her jaw; he waited for her eyes to open before he kissed her mouth, slipped his hand beneath the hem of her nightdress to stroke her thigh to flank, his desire for her unconcealed, apart from any civility. He moved behind her or above, disappearing in the silvered light like the moon’s hidden side. She heard his voice, the words he uttered without first considering her response. Without hesitation.

“I wanted you so badly. I loved you but not only that. I wanted to believe loving you was enough, but it wasn’t,” he said, his skin warm, matching his breath with hers.

“You wanted this?” she asked, arching against him as if she were tempting him when it was herself she pleased first. His hand tightened at her hip.

“Body and soul. All of you. When it was Boldwood, I could bear it. He was honorable, he sought your happiness. If he could give it to you,” Gabriel said, somehow closer, his accent stronger, the sound of the waves and the chalk downs in it. The moonlight was supposed to be cooler than the sun, but it was not. She felt her heartbeat speed up as if she ran a race she might win. Gabriel-in-the-moonlight was always the winner.

“To think of you with Frank—to know he’d never care for you, to see him think you were his, you who would never belong to anyone,” he muttered and she heard his anger and longing, as if he did not hold her in his arms, as if she was not urging him towards her.

“You wanted me to be yours,” she offered, as she felt him touch her. It was the greatest intimacy and it was not enough, not with him; she was a different wife at midnight.

“You said that, you feared it, that I wanted to tame you,” he said, each phrase paired with his body straining against hers, so she cried out and felt his mouth at her ear, on her throat. His beard was rough against the delicate skin and she gloried in it.

“I never wanted that, you were wrong. I wanted you wild, like this.” 

“Yours,” she murmured.

“No, Sh’ba, not mine. I only wanted to see your real face, I wanted to see how I might get you to show me,” Gabriel said. “I wanted to take away any hands touching you that did not seek your pleasure first,” he added, pausing longer between the words. Even now, he could not be anything other than gentle, though every movement was fierce and confident.

“You were wrong. Sh’ba, you were wrong,” he said. She was wordless, not consumed but consummate, made compleat. Gabriel-in-the-moonlight knew she would speak when he was spent, her head against his breast, saying the only what was necessary between them in the night.

“Gabriel, my Gabriel.”

“Aye, yours, beloved.”

In the morning, when the sun rose and the moon sank among the trees, that was his same greeting. It did not shame her, nor make her blush to hear it, to know she was known to him and he to her, moonlight or no.

**Author's Note:**

> Movie Gabriel has such a wonderful reserve, even in that last scene with the kiss, that I felt compelled to write something that challenged it. And to give them a chance to talk about Frank and Boldwood with real vulnerability. Plus, Gabriel in the moonlight is something I feel we would all be happy to envision, though Michael Sheen fans might prefer an AU where William is the one talking to Bathsheba about Gabriel. Or not talking about Gabriel at all.
> 
> The title is from Thomas Hardy's poem "To the Moon."


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